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Fujitsu to Build Data Center Down Under (Sydney)

Paul Lilly — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:49:06 -0600

Fujitsu announced it is currently scoping out areas of Western Sydney, Australia hoping to find a location with enough power to build and run a new data center, TheWhir.com reports.

The IT services provider is already constructing new data centers in Perth and Melbourne, both of which address the lack of data center space in Australia. But one thing Fujitsu has found is that existing data centers in the country lack the necessary power to host boatloads of blade-based servers.

In addition to finding a location with the proper power requirements, Fujitsu wants an area with cooler temperatures in order to deploy new free cooling power reduction designs, just as it is currently doing in Perth and Melbourne.

Toshiba's Market Share Increases After Acquisition of Fujitsu HDDs

Bart Salisbury — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:26:13 -0500

Toshiba’s $328 million acquisition of hard drive maker Fujitsu is bearing some early fruit. The deal, made earlier this year, was an effort by Toshiba to increase it’s presence in the enterprise storage market. Toshiba acquired all of Fujitsu’s hard drive related business including design, development, manufacturing, and sales.

The result: Toshiba saw it’s global hard drive market share jump to 13.2%. Toshiba’s share of the 2.5-inch drive market rose 6.5 points, from 16.1% to 24.6%, while it’s share in the sub-2.5-inch market grew even more, 8.3 points, from 18.3% to 26.5%.

Toshiba’s future plans involve the development of solid-state drives that combine Toshiba’s NAND flash memory technology with Fujitsu’s enterprise hard drive technology.

Image Credit: Toshiba

Toshiba Finalizes Takover of Fujitsu Hard Drive Business

Paul Lilly — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:56:41 -0500

After months of negotiations and ironing out the details, Toshiba and Fujitsu have put their John Hancocks on the appropriate papers to make Toshiba's take over of Fujitsu's multinational hard drive design manufacturing business a done deal, eWeek.com reports.

The two sides had hoped to seal the deal by July 1, but it took longer than expected to finalize the details. Neither side has disclosed financial terms of the buyout, but according to Toshiba, the buyout propels the company to the top of the storage heap.

"Effectively, the deal makes Toshiba the world's largest full-service data storage supplier, when taking into account hard disk drives, solid-state NAND flash disks, optical disk drives, software, and everything else the company provides," Toshiba marketing executive Scott McCabe told eWeek.

Equally important, the deal pushes Toshiba into the enterprise HDD market, a sector the company has been trying to break into for years.

Image Credit: e-recruit.co.za

Quanta Reportedly Receives Big Order for All-in-One PCs from Fujitsu, Acer, and MSI

Paul Lilly — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:56:06 -0500

Most gamers wouldn't think twice about buying an all-in-one PC, but that's okay, because all-in-ones are selling just fine without them. According to a previous report in China's Commercial Times, global all-in-one PC shipments are expected to reach 6.5 million units by the end of the year, accounting for 9 percent of all PCs.

Now it's looking like that number may have been a little conservative. Citing un-named industry sources, news and rumor site DigiTimes says Quanta Computer has received roughly 2 million all-in-one PC orders from Fujitsu, Acer, and MSI and will start shipping products soon, ending the year with a bang. Most of those will measure 20 to 23 inches.

HP, another client of Quanta and maker of the popular TouchSmart series, will also receive more all-in-one shipments starting in October.

Image Credit: MSI

Fujitsu P8020

Katherine Stevenson — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:38:47 -0500

This small wonder fails to stand out in any one area

Fujitsu has been a pioneer in the notebook category, dating back to its P2000, one of the first ultraportables to feature an optical drive. In this roundup, however, the standard Fujitsu set is better implemented by its competitors.

At 10.75x8.25x1.5 inches, the P8020 has a slightly smaller footprint than the others, but, sadly, where that’s most apparent is in the keyboard. It’s surprising how less than a half-inch can change your typing experience, but we found the slightly smaller keys and key pad difficult to use. The P8020’s touchpad has the distinction of being multi-touch, meaning you can zoom in and out by pinching or separating your fingers, a moderately useful tool. We’d rather have multi-touch right-click, frankly.

At two pounds, 13.8 ounces, the P8020 is light but feels well-constructed, although there’s some flex to the body and display cover. The entire unit is matte black, save the glossy black lid. Fingerprints on this surface are of course inevitable, but the lid also picked up a scratch after minimal use.

The glossy finish of the P8020's display enclosure is matched by a glossy screen.

The P8020 is no thinner than the X200s and 2530p, but Fujitsu opted for the same ULV 1.4GHz processor found in the R600 and paired it with 2GB of RAM—there’s easy access to an empty DIMM slot on the underside of the notebook should you want more memory. Storage is handled by a 64GB SSD. (A 128GB SSD will run you $200 more, while hard drive options ranging from 160GB to 320GB will save you from $200 to $300.)

The SSD has the advantage of being more durable than an HDD, but we’d prefer more capacity, especially since the Toshiba-brand MLC drive in the P8020 doesn’t offer any performance advantage—it had an average read speed of 67.2MB/s in HD Tach, which isn’t dramatically better than the 52.1MB/s of the R600’s 160GB HDD. In fact, the P8020 fared worse than the R600 in all the benchmarks except battery life. That’s not to say it didn’t perform satisfactorily. The P8020 has the chops for productivity and content-creation purposes; it can certainly serve for typical day-to-day use.

In terms of ports and slots, the P8020 matches the other notebooks in this roundup—although it features PC Card rather than Express Card technology, which doesn’t really limit your expansion options but does seem quaint.

In the end, the P8020 suffers most from the caliber of the competition. Taken as a whole, the P8020 is a competent machine, with a wealth of features packed into its wee formfactor. But with other ultraportables costing the same or less while offering superior qualities and/or features, the P8020 can’t help but seem average by comparison.

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Fujitsu Now Shipping First USB 3.0 Bridge Chips

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:46:13 -0500

Fujitsu has begun shipping its first generation USB 3.0-to-SATA chip, the company announced in a press release on Monday. The MB86C30A, as the chip is called, is capable of delivering the 5Gbps maximum data transfer rate expected from SuperSpeed USB. The first engineering samples based on the chip will be ready next month. However, commercial variants will only be available next year.

The chip features Fujitsu’s AES encryption/decryption engine that supports data encryption/decryption at a rate of up to 300MB per second. The first PCs equipped with Superspeed USB are expected to become available during the far end of the year, according to the July issue of Nikkei Electronics Asia.

Image Credit: Fujitsu

Fujitsu Says New Rig with "German Ultra Clocking" Will be "Fastest Ever"

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:31:31 -0500

Fujitsu is said to be working on the “fastest rig on the planet.” While it is very common for car ads to heap praise on German engineering, the same is not true when it comes to PCs. But a slide (see below) related to the upcoming “fastest rig on the planet” is a laconic ode to German engineering.

The slide credits “German ultra clocking” for making Fujitsu’s mysterious gaming rig the fastest in the world. It also mentions that the rig features the very best “hand selected components”. Fujitsu posted a link to a teaser video - which miraculously doesn’t make even a thickly veiled reference to the gaming rig – on Twitter.

Image Credit: PC Launches

Fujitsu Releases 128 GigaFLOP "Venus" Processor for Supercomputers

Paul Lilly — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:38:03 -0500

Fujitsu this week laid a humdinger on Intel by unveiling the world's fastest CPU. The new chip is thought to be about 2.5 times faster than anything Intel has in its lineup, while also consuming two-thirds less power.

You can put any grandiose ideas of picking one up and setting new benchmarking records to rest, as the 'Venus' chip, or otherwise known as the SPARC64 VIIIfx, is designed for supercomputers. As such, Fujitsu claims the new CPU can process a mind boggling 128 billion computations per second, making Fujitsu the first Japanese firm in a decade to wear the raw CPU performance crown.

Built on a 45nm manufacturing process, Venus comes with eight cores and an integrated memory controller spread across two square centimeters. Fujitsu says it will take several years to come up with practical applications for the new chip, but that it could see use in pharmaceutical research, astronomy, weather prediction, scientific researching, and Folding@Home while running Crysis (we may have added the last two on our own).

Image Credit: PC Watch